Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work, 2017; installation view, New Museum, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio.

Presenting approximately 800 drawings from the artist’s creative career since the 1970s, Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work at New Museum demonstrates the artist’s obsessive relationship with language and literature in an ambivalent tone that is both darkly ironic and lovingly inspired. In his distinctive caricaturistic style, Pettibon juxtaposes figurative images with fragmented texts throughout all mediums and subject matters. The combination is consistent, despite his almost schizophrenic voices in different series, whether they are celebrating nature, mocking religions, or attacking political figures.

Pettibon’s surf drawings, the most visually captivating series in the exhibition, metaphorically embody his joyful literary fetish. The surfer, represented as a solitary hero exploring and challenging the natural sublime, evokes the Romantic ideal of a creative genius wrestling in the sea of inspiration. (Fittingly, the title of the show is a reference to a Byron poem.) Drawn in brilliant blue shades, the currents’ patterns have flowing, organic characteristics that suggest a visualization of one’s stream of consciousness, or even hints of the rhythms of poetic verse. The figures appear diminutive against the monumental waves engulfing them. The tides carry a sense of increasing velocity; the hero is nearly submerged into the swells and swirls of the blue water. The expansive images with texts allude to the artist’s cumulative, almost compulsive creative process. All of the 20,000 drawings Pettibon has made in his life are captioned; the sheer quantity and the variety of words seem to suggest a form of logorrhea.

On the flip side, the artist uses language satirically to disrupt the implied historical narratives of political propaganda, religion, and mass media in America. He subverts quotes and slogans into dark, humorous, sometimes non-sequitur captions that reveal the absurdity of their contexts. Donald Trump announces, “You’re hired!” Jesus Christ urges the viewer, “Pick up your pens, if you can” as he will “inform you of all that has befallen me from beginning to end.” Charles Manson declares that “I didn’t tell them anything they didn’t get from their fathers first.” As these texts combine with comically bizarre, yet skillfully drawn, grotesque renderings, the works manifest how religious, political, and cult leaders manipulate and misappropriate words to hypnotize the public on an everyday basis. In Pettibon’s art world, language is both earnestly embraced as an expression of creativity and critically analyzed as insidious means of seduction.

Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work will be on view through April 9, 2017.

Lux Yuting Bai is an independent curator and writer. She is also a Curatorial Fellow at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu Can’t Help Myself (2016) in Tales of Our Time at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York.

Launched by the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative at the Guggenheim, Tales of Our Time aims to challenge traditional notions of place and history through diverse forms of storytelling. In preparation for the show, curators Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru traveled across China in search of avant-garde artists outside of the mainstream who actively engage with social issues. Eight selected artists from a wide range of backgrounds examine and interrogate social-political realities in contemporary Greater China. Despite the vast differences in media, style, and perspective of the works, the exhibition engages its audience in an effortless flow of narratives like a collection of exhilarating short stories, offering gripping plots, surprising twists, and satisfying climaxes.

Known for creating spectacles, Hou deploys his trademark style. When entering the exhibition, the viewer immediately encounters Can’t Help Myself (2016) by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, a gigantic, frenetic robot violently splashing thick crimson liquid all over the space. The headlights are white and luminous, reminiscent of operating tables. The glass walls that contain the monster look like ceiling windows in a downpour of blood. The passage, uncomfortably narrow to walk through, forces a confrontation between the beholder and the spectacle.  Tsang Kin-Wah’s video installation, In the End Is the Word (2016), features edited online footage of sea battles over Diaoyu Islands, the subject of a perpetual territorial dispute between China and Japan. The lights in the room strangely point downward. A conspicuous space lies between the screen and the back of the chamber. The design, however, delivers a pleasant surprise when white words begin flowing over the ground like waves washing up on shore.

More sprawling texts lead one downstairs, where further theatrics unfold. Dimly lit by a wide screen and with walls covered in ink drawings, the cinematic space evokes Plato’s cave. The allegorical animation of Sun Xun’s Mythological Time (2016), screened at the center, merges seamlessly with the stunning mythical visuals of the mural-like background. In the adjacent room that showcases Zhuo Tao’s Land of the Throat (2016), two face-to-face screens operate simultaneously, while the viewer sits awkwardly on the tilted, skateboard-shaped ground, experiencing a disoriented reality with the characters. After a breathtaking flag made of seventy-five types of fabric, a couple of secretive taxi conversations, and a series of identically twisted nails, the audience is invited join a relaxing traditional Chinese tea party that is part of an activist work titled Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken (2016) by Yangjiang Group. The activity intends to soothe the anxieties evoked by the other artworks while constructing a harmonious, utopian social environment. One may even test its result with a blood pressure meter, finishing the otherwise intense series of narratives on a humorous note.

The complex composition of some pieces makes it difficult to identify the artists without additional notation, and the labels could be difficult to find. Nonetheless, the connections among the works, the space, and the viewer create a coherent, immersive, and emotionally engaging art experience.

Tales of Our Time is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York through March 10, 2017.

Lux Yuting Bai is an independent curator and writer. She is also a Curatorial Fellow at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

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Installation view of Coille Hooven: Tell It By Heart.
Photo by Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.

Focusing on material-based art, the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, presents a range of contemporary works that cross the disciplines of fine art, crafts, and design. Current exhibitions throughout the museum emphasize transformation. Françoise Grossen Selects introduces the many influences that have formed the artist’s vision over the decades; Crochet Coral Reef: Toxic Seas demonstrates how our marine ecosystem has evolved under climate change. Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years showcases the artist’s exploration of clay as an artistic medium. Coille Hooven: Tell it by Heart addresses transformation and feminism, exhibiting fifty-five sculptures that range from vessels to figurative busts. The exhibition not only surveys thirty years of Hooven’s career, but also celebrates the maturity and growth of the female body through a medium connected to domestic life.

Curator Shannon R. Stratton organized the show by theme, and a wall text begins each section with a quote summarizing its focus. For example, the section dedicated to mythology opens with a quotation from Joseph Campbell: “Myth is the song of the imagination inspired by the energies of the body.” The text also analyzes of the works, mainly explicating its symbolism. Drawn from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the many symbols Hooven deploys, such as reptiles, vessels, flowers, and the moon, are recognizable in their associations with womanhood. The result is an amusing marriage of domesticity and surrealism: teapots with serpentine handles, clay pillows holding little giraffes, a decorative swan with windows carved in its body. Her later art is bolder in its feminist message, such as a series of naked headless female figurines in provocative poses. In a 2000 interview, Hooven explained that they illustrate self-acceptance and sexual objectification.

The silver coatings of the display barriers are rather conspicuous and prevent close scrutiny of the work, dampening the intimacy that Hooven intends. Pieces are displayed in unusual contexts. For example, anthropomorphic figurines stand on playful jumbo blocks that resemble shoe displays in department stores. Disfigured nudes are scattered on a large plate that looks like a swimming pool. Busts of Eve are placed on tall pedestals of the sort typically used to support classical sculptures. Tell it by Heart tells its tales of Coille Hooven’s work with elegance, and highlights Hooven’s long career transforming clay into objects that bridge the everyday and the fantastical.

Coille Hooven: Tell it by Heart is on view at Museum of Arts and Design, New York, through February 5, 2017.

Lux Yuting Bai is an independent curator and writer. She is also a Curatorial Fellow at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

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